


A Friend's Infirmities

by RoundBrainySpecs



Category: Adam Adamant Lives!
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-16 12:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21507775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoundBrainySpecs/pseuds/RoundBrainySpecs
Summary: An exploration of the growth of Adam Adamant and Georgina Jones' friendship through helping each other through the tragedies of each other's lives. It is not, however, an easy road; Adam hides his pain behind stoicism and gentlemanly snark, and Georgina behind a cheerful smile.
Relationships: Adam Adamant & Georgina Jones
Kudos: 7





	1. The Funeral

The funeral was a large one. Sam Jones may not have had much family, but his had been a face beloved by many. He had been a gentle and kind man, an understanding and sympathetic ear to the troubled. Even most of the regulars to his discotheque came, sobered and only a few able to hold back tears that they shed for the man who was the exception to the rule that no one over thirty understood them. Amongst the mourners, Georgina felt alone; for all the others her grandfather was a friend, but to her he had been her world. She couldn't help feeling it was selfish, but she wished the mourners were not there for her grandfather, for he was gone, but there for her; oh sure, they hugged her and told how sorry they were for her loss and to call any time, but it was awkward and hurried as if they wanted to rush away as soon as possible. She shivered though the air was warm; she hadn't any more tears, nothing left but deep, lonely grief.

Suddenly she felt a comforting and protective presence at her shoulder, and the wind blew the edge of a silk-lined opera cape against her legs. She didn't have to look to know who it was, as only one person she had acquaintance of would dress in such a manner, but she did anyway. Adam Adamant detected her gaze and met it; his eyes did not shift from hers, as so many of the other mourners did, but gazed back with quiet sympathy. When the vicar had finished, Adam turned to her and murmured, "I am sorry for your loss, Miss Jones. Samuel Jones, from the little I knew of him, was a good man."

Georgina spoke around the lump in her throat with a quiet and heartfelt, "Thank you, Mr. Adamant."

"If it will not be deemed unseemly, I wonder if I may provide you with dinner?"

"How? You haven't any money."

"While my assets are held by the government, I have been provided with an allowance until my identity has been established."

She assented.

The restaurant was more formal than she would have chosen, but it was nice and Adam Adamant was considerate company. In conversation he did not balk from the subject of her grandfather, rather instead he told her of his brief acquaintance with Samuel Jones; how he had looked as a young man, how he had seemed kind and honorable, someone Adam would have been proud to call friend if circumstances had allowed. Adam then asked her to tell him about Sam, and though she started out slowly, soon the stories and everything she had loved about her grandfather came pouring out. Adam listened with undivided attention, and they laughed at the funny stories, and toasted Sam. What had been simply mourning had turned into a celebration of the life of a good man. When Adam had the cab drop her off at her flat, she still cried through much of the night, but she didn't feel so alone and neither did her grandfather seem so gone.


	2. A Blow to the Head

  
It was not so much the blow (for he had suffered far worse and still been able to fight) but the flashback that accompanied it that debilitated him and allowed his enemies to capture him. He got out of it (as he always did), but he couldn't escape the nightmares that hounded him worse than usual, or the incapacitating flashback he experienced in public when he saw a woman who looked very like Louise - an experience after which he locked himself in his room and neither spoke to, nor saw, anyone. When he reemerged a few day later (to Simms and Georgina's relief and the suspension of their plans to build a battering ram), he appeared to be the same old Adam Adamant: self-possessed, immaculately (if anachronistically) dressed and groomed, complete with his courtly manner and the mischievousness that would light in his dark eyes and emerge in his dry voice. However, when he thought they weren't looking, Georgina and Simms would catch the raw, haunting pain and weariness in his eyes. After a few days the glimpses of this vulnerability disappeared, but Simms said - confidentially, of course - that Adam's nightmares were worse than they had been for some time.


	3. Telephone

"Good evening, Miss Jones." Adam Adamant's voice was, as usual, slightly too loud over the telephone. "I thought it might save Simms the bother of your incorrigible questioning into my whereabouts, and I the worry of wondering where you might spring from next, if I asked you to accompany me on an assignment to investigate a series of peculiar occurrences."  
She didn't want to see him; he would know, somehow he would see beneath, and right now all she wanted to do was bury the pain under endless chatter, loud music, and booze.  
"I'm sorry, Mr. Adam, but I promised to meet up with some friends tonight."  
True enough.  
"Are you feeling ill, Miss Jones?" Adam was concerned. "It's not like you to miss the opportunity to meddle in my affairs."  
"No, I'm fine," Georgina replied, forcing more of her usual cheerfulness into her voice, "it's just it's going to be a whacking good party, and there's this new band that's going to be playing there. All the really groovy cats are going to be at this thing."  
"Cats? Are there often animals at these modern parties?"  
Despite everything, she found Adam's almost perpetual confusion over popular slang amusing, "Oh yes, lots."  
"Considering the amount of noise and the class of persons who attend your parties," Adam said drily, "I would have thought the addition of animals to be redundant."  
"Why, Mr. Adamant, I do think you're catching on," Georgina laughed.  
"Are you quite sure you won't reconsider?"  
"I'm sure."  
"And you won't try to follow me?"  
"No, I won't."  
"All right, then," He said, and she thought he almost sounded disappointed. "Au revoir, Miss Jones."  
"Goodbye, Mr. Adamant."  
She went to the party, laughed, danced, drank, and decided she was now an ardent fan of the new band and she was going to buy every record they ever came out with. Then she went home and cried herself to sleep.


	4. More Than Nostalgia, Part 1

Adam was obsessing over a new piece of furniture he had bought. 'New', however, was something of a misnomer, as the divan was well over one-hundred years old and had been a gift to Adam's parents. He fluttered around it, his eyes alight with a nostalgia akin to happiness as he ran his hands across it, tutted at some minuscule tear or scuff, and sat himself upon it only to fling himself up and spin about his living room trying to decide the best place to put it.  
Georgina watched him with amusement. "I really don't understand why you insist on buying this old stuff, Mr. Adam; you could buy much more fashionable stuff for a lot less."  
"Fashion, Miss Jones, is temporal, gone with the next wind of public fancy."  
"Yeah, I can see that," Georgina teased, "that's why you can't buy this stuff in the shops anymore."  
"This, my dear Miss Jones," Adam gestured to the divan, "is not fashion, it is elegance, and I can hardly hold myself at fault for the taste of this generation."  
Georgina giggled, shaking her head, then asked more seriously, "Why do you buy this old furniture, Adam?"  
Adam didn't answer right away, his eyes darkened and he hesitated, but finally said, "Because it is evidence they were here. Because, if but for the most fleeting of moments, it feels as though they're still alive."  
"Your family and friends."  
"Yes."  
They said nothing more on the subject, but Georgina never laughed at his obsession over the old furniture again.


	5. More Than Nostalgia, Part 2

"Oh, come on, Adam, at least give them a chance," Georgina begged.  
"Miss Jones, I believe I have made my opinion of this modern noise you call music quite clear," Adam replied. "While I am honoured by your invitation and I appreciate that the infamy of this band will generate business to your (what do you call it?) discotheque, I do not see how my presence at one of your rock concerts would benefit either of us in any way."  
Georgina plopped herself down on his divan, her bouncy, room-filling personality wilting into something small and uncertain. When she spoke, her voice was little more than a wavering murmur. "I wanted them to come. I pushed and I begged and I called in favours to get them to come. But now- now I don't know whether I can go and not make a fool of myself. If you come, maybe -" Georgina took a breath, then after a moment said with quiet seriousness, "They were grandfather's favourite band; he dreamt of them coming to play."  
Adam was silent for a moment, considering the slight form. His voice was gentle when he replied, "I think I understand, Miss Jones. I should consider it a privilege to accompany you to honour your grandfather's memory."  
The band was far too loud and he still found little pleasure in the music and none in the convulsions this generation called dancing (which he refrained from, despite the many and varied attempts by Georgina or others to get him to join in). However, he found that he didn't really care; Georgina's eyes were brighter than he'd ever seen them, living in a time and place she loved and missed – and he (despite his own discomfort) wished on her behalf that the night would never end.


	6. Shot

A frantic knocking roused Georgina from slumber. She stumbled groggily up the steps to her door and opened it. She barely had time for a bemused 'what?' before Simms, Adam Adamant's valet, brushed through the door. Simms' perpetual expression of amusement was absent, replaced by a worried gravitas that made her stomach sink into a cold, roiling mass.  
"It's Mr. Adamant, Georgina," Simms' sepulchral voice intoned, "he's been shot."  
She remembered little of the next few minutes, just a flurry of finding a coat, tears stinging in her eyes and questions strangled by the lump that had closed off her vocal cords. Somewhere in the midst of the rush, Simms told her that Adam Adamant was not dead, not yet anyway, but had been rushed to the hospital with a gunshot wound among several other injuries.  
Adam was in surgery. There was nothing for Georgina and Simms to do but wait in the halls, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, hoping the best and fearing the worst.  
Georgina sat with her head in her hands, shivering though Simms had even covered her with his own jacket. The pair were (Adam might have commented, had he been there) remarkably and uncharacteristically silent. Their relationship was one of unabated banter, but now Georgina could not arouse even one word of empty insult nor Simms a single rhyme for his constant limericks. The two started every time a nurse would rush up or down the hall, half hoping she came with news, half hoping that she would go on by.  
"He can't die, can he, Simms?" Georgina whispered, tears leaking down her face.  
"He's Adam Adamant, madam," Simms replied, "You know the stories better than I, and know greater evils than the blackguards who shot him have tried to kill him before."  
When the news finally did arrive, it was that he had survived surgery. It would be touch and go for a while, but the doctor did feel that the presence of any family or friends might be of assistance to his will, and that was the most important factor that might draw him through. So Georgina sat at his side. She told him how after her parents' deaths her grandfather told her stories of the great Adam Adamant, how the stories of his exploits had given her strength, hope, and comfort when everything had been at its darkest; how he had saved her life before she was even born. She told him that when she had heard of his discovery in the ice on the same day her grandfather had been killed, how it seemed to her that he had returned to save her again; that he was as much a tie to the modern world as she was for him  
Over a day later, when the worst was over and Adam out of immediate danger, he motioned weakly for her to come over, and whispered quietly, "Thank you, Miss Jones, for your words and for my life - twice over, now. And I am glad that my seeming demise occurred that I might have the honor of saving your life, though I did not know it until now. "


	7. Cold

Something was wrong, Georgina could feel it the moment she stepped into the flat.  
Adam was curled into a foetal position on the floor, his arms wrapped around his shivering form, his gaze far away and filled with horror. Not so different from how Georgina had first found him.  
Though she assumed Simms must be out or he would have already found Adam, she called anyway, "Simms! Simms, are you here?"  
Adam reacted to her voice, turning his head toward her, but his gaze still fastened on some sight only he could see. "Louise? I'm so cold… so cold."  
Georgina managed to lever Adam up on to a sofa - no easy feat, for though he was thin, it was less thinness than wiry-ness which many a bulkier man had underestimated - and fetched as many blankets as she could find and heaped them on top of Adam. She then dragged over a chair and sat perched near, as like to a guardian gargoyle as an elfin-faced young woman could be.  
"Louise, what have you done?" Adam's anguished murmur affected Georgina much as seeing him stabbed in cold blood by Simms would have done. There was so much pain and betrayal in those five words, it made her sick with anger at whoever could cause such pain in her friend.  
Eventually, though, despite her anger and best intentions, she fell asleep. When she awoke she saw the blankets had been neatly folded and laid at the end of the sofa, save one which was spread across her. Adam was sitting in one of his other chairs nearby, one which did not allow for any direct view of the city out a window, reading a book. He looked as like himself as he ever did save for a certain haunted quality that hung about his eyes. Noticing her stirring, he glanced up and bent the book towards closure but did not entirely shut its pages. A slight smile drew his lips upwards. "You are awake, Miss Jones. May I take it that Simms gave you the new passcode, or must I presume on your ingenuity?"  
"Adam, who is Louise?"  
Adam blenched slightly at the name, and the smile disappeared from his lips.  
"You say her name every time you have one of these-" She struggled to find the right words, "these daylight nightmares."  
Adam was quiet for a moment, before saying quietly, "She - I had hoped, once, to make her my wife, when the world had become a safer place, when I had defeated the fiend behind a thousand plots who sought to sink the world into chaos. Today, in 1901, we met for the first time. It is a terrible thing when a memory that had brought such joy could bring me to the display you walked in upon earlier." Adam stopped abruptly, then paused momentarily as if to collect himself. "However, even my precautions did not save Louise from the attentions and snares of The Face. It was she who led me into the trap which my nemesis had laid for me."  
"She sounds like a right-" Georgina stopped at the look on Adam's face.  
"I cannot fault her," He said quietly, "The Face is - _was_ \- a master of deception and lies. Even Eve, purest of women, was deceived by a silver, forked tongue."  
"But she hurt you! Betrayed you!" Georgina's eyes were filled with fiery anger.  
Adam flinched at Georgina's words. "Yes, and as you have seen, it is a wound I fear shall not heal in my lifetime. But 'love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,' Miss Jones."  
"I'm sorry, Adam," Georgina said, calming herself, "I just - I hate what happened to you, and to find out that it was someone you loved who did it to you-"  
"Thank you," Adam said stiffly, "for your assistance earlier, and I appreciate your sympathy. I do not wish to seem rude, but I should like to be left alone for now."  
"But what if _it_ happens again?"  
"Simms will be home from his holiday any time now, and should an episode occur between now and then, it is unlikely to be a long period of time before I am discovered by him."  
Georgina reluctantly acquiesced. She paused at the door to the lift room and leaned back into the parlor. "I'm sorry, Mr. Adamant, for hurting you and for what hurt you."


	8. Lethe

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Adamant, sir, but it's Georgina. She's quite royally pissed - drunk - and I don't feel right about sending her home like this," the manager of one of Georgina's favourite discotheque haunts yelled into the phone, struggling to be heard above the music that enveloped her.  
"Do please try to detain her and I shall be there as soon as I can. Thank you, madam."  
Adam threw on his cape and stalked down to his car, driving quickly, weaving in and out of the midnight traffic. He screeched to a halt as a svelte figure stumbled out in front of him, still trying to flag him down with overexaggerated waves. He flung himself out of the Mini Cooper and picked Georgina up from the road in a fluid, precise motion.  
"Oh, Mr. Adam," Georgina giggled, "to the rescue again."  
He said nothing, jaw set in concern and anger, and bundled her into the car and covered her with his cape.  
He drove in silence while Georgina nodded off against the window.  
The slight, sleeping Georgina was easily carried up to her flat. She squinted up at him as he opened the door and squirmed out of his arms, staggering down the steps into the main part of the loft flat. He caught her arm as she stumbled on the last step. He led her to the backless daybed where he helped her lie down, covering her with a colourful crocheted blanket. He sat at her side.  
"This needs to stop, Miss Jones," He said with quiet sincerity.  
"What? Having a good time?" She laughed, yawning.  
"This drunken debauchery you engage in night after night. It's not becoming of a young lady."  
"I really don't see how that's any of your business," she mumbled sullenly.  
"Your grandfather-"  
"Isn't here, is he?" She snapped, tears stinging her eyes.  
"But I am, and I feel it is my duty to watch over you in his stead."  
"Well no one asked you, did they? I certainly didn't."  
Adam's face set, becoming a emotionless mask. "No, Miss Jones."  
"So stop. Go away. Just go." Tears stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks. "Just leave me alone."  
She turned away from him, pulling the blanket up to her cheeks to hide the tears coursing down them.  
"As you wish." Adam made a stiff bow, slung his cape over his arm, and made for the door. Just before opening it, he stopped, his hand on the handle. "Grief is a wound that cuts deeply, and I have seen too many good men lose themselves to it at the bottom of a glass. Please, I entreat you, from now on give your life the same deference you have given mine. Should you need me, I trust you remember my phone number or will find a way into my flat. Good night, Miss Jones."


	9. A Friend's Infirmities

_Falling, falling, falling into a black abyss._  
 _Beautiful, beloved Louise, the woman he had given his heart to. She stroked his face, her voice and eyes mocking as she betrayed him. "So clever, but oh-so vulnerable."_  
 _The world fell to pieces as her voice continued to ring in his ears. He saw great metal dragons chew down and set fire to his ancestral home. He saw his friends and family calling out to him, but The Face injected the icy contents of the syringe into his arm and he lay paralyzed, forced to watch as they died before his eyes in a thousand different ways - some shriveling and decaying into husks and bones, others blown to pieces by bombs._  
 _Then cold; hellish, torturous, eternal cold. Buried alive. Buried in ice._  
Adam's eyes fled open in the pitch darkness, breath racing, the nightmare coursing through every inch of him. He didn't know where he was. Was he still buried in the dark? He couldn't move. He was paralyzed, unable to move as terror crushed him from within and cold seemed to crush him from without. Though he was sweating, he shook with a chill buried deep within his bones. Slowly more recent events fought their way past the nightmare and he groped frantically for the light beside his bed, his breath coming out in a sigh of relief when the pale light illuminated his bedroom.  
He couldn't stay in his bed, not with the nightmare still hanging over him. He got out of bed and pulled on his dressing gown, his teeth chattering with a cold that was more memory and nightmare than reality, and went out into the sitting room to the fireplace he insisted was to be lit at nights no matter how warm the day. The fire had sunk low, mostly coals now, and just when he had finished heaping several logs in the fireplace, he heard a movement behind him. He turned, poker in hand, but there was no enemy. On the couch before the fire was Georgina Jones, curled in sleep.  
He had ceased wondering (and rather started regarding it as a game) how she managed to get into his house no matter how many times he changed the passcode on the lift that was the only entrance to his abode, but she generally at least followed his rule of being out of his house at a respectable time of night. He stopped worrying about how it would affect both his and (especially) her public respectability when he saw the tears that had not yet dried upon her face and the photograph she clutched in her hand. He drew it gently from her fingers and gazed upon the picture of a smiling family; a young Georgina practically having to be held in place by her frazzled but smiling mother and holding hands with a man with the same mischievous look to his eyes that showed in his daughter's, and the round friendly face of Georgina's grandfather. All but Georgina dead now.  
Adam retrieved a blanket and tucked it around the vulnerable form, then seated himself on the other end of the sofa, and watched over her, wishing, not for the first time both that there had been some way to spare her the pain of her present position and that he could find some way to pay back the unfailing kindness the young woman had shown him even on the night when her world had come crashing down. Eventually his eyes drifted to the fire, his mind to his own failings, and his thoughts descended into places deep and dark and full of pain.  
_So clever, but oh-so vulnerable. So vulnerable... So vulnerable…_ The words played over and over, again and again in his head, and the chill deepened within him despite the fire.  
He started when Georgina moved closer to him and linked a protective and comforting arm through his shivering one.  
"I'm so glad you're my family, Mr. Adamant," Georgina murmured, laying her head on his shoulder.  
Her declaration shocked him for a moment, unsure whether to take it for some kind of impropriety. Then Adam put his other hand protectively over the arm linked through his, and replied quietly, "And I, you, Georgina."  
Adam's eyes flickered to his bookshelf. _Le Morte d'Arthur_ , the _Chanson de Roland_ , _Les Miserables_ , _The Three Musketeers_ ; families lay within those pages - kindred not by blood, but by purpose or love. The concept of a family that was not tied by blood was not a new one, and he wondered why the very thought had even surprised him. Georgina was his family, in more ways even than his own had been. Whether at his best or at his worst, Georgina was always there - whether or not she agreed with him - and it had been her company and unfailing friendship, much more even than his own resilience, which had allowed him to adjust to the insane world he had suddenly found himself a part of. For the first time in a long, long time, Adam felt warm.  
They said nothing more that night, glad simply to sit and watch the fire, basking in the presence and strength of their family. There was no need for oaths nor for further words, each knew the other was there to bear their infirmities and always would be.


End file.
